1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to operating systems, and more particularly to a technique for running a plurality of operating systems simultaneously.
2. Related Art
Multiple resident operating systems are desirable because particular operating systems are either well suited or required for loading and operating certain applications. Further, an additional resident operating system may be necessary when an update of a processor and operating system results in an older version of an application no longer being compatible with the updated system. A conventional computing system allows for switching between multiple resident operating systems, but is not optimized for multiple operating systems operating simultaneously. When multiple operating systems are run concurrently with known techniques analogous to multitasking, contention for register access occurs. To address register access contention, conventional techniques swap register content out to memory when a new operating system desires control. Frequent swapping of register contents results in slower performance of the computing system. Further, known emulation techniques for running multiple operating systems also results in slower performance. Thus, there is a need for an improved technique for running multiple operating systems concurrently.